First Words (26)

"Death is my beat. I make my living from it. I forge my professional reputation on it. I treat it with the passion and precision of an undertaker — somber and sympathetic about it when I'm with the bereaved, a skilled craftsman with it when I'm alone. I've always thought the secret with dealing with death was to keep it at arm's length. That's the rule. Don't let it breathe in your face."

Michael Connelly, The Poet.

First Words (25)

"I. Bernal Díaz del Castillo, citizen and Regidor of the most loyal city of Santiago de Guatemala, one of the first discoverers and conquerors of New Spain and its provinces, and the Cape of Honduras and all that lies within that land, a Native of the very noble and distinguished town of Medina del Campo, and the son of its former Regidor, Francisco Díaz del Castillo, also known as the Courteous, and his legal wife Maria Diez Rejon (may their souls rest in glory), tell you the story of myself and my comrades; all true conquerors, who served His Majesty in the discovery, conquest, pacification and settlement of the provinces of New Spain; one of the finest countries yet discovered in the New World, this expedition being undertaken by our own efforts, without His Majesty's knowledge."

Bernal Díaz de Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain (Begun in 1568)

Díaz died on his encomienda in the environs of La Antigua Guatemala in 1585 aged 93, the last survivor of the assault on Tenochtitlán, slightly embittered with Cortes that he had little more wealth and status to bequeathe than that already in his possession when he departed Spain.

Nevertheless, Rudy tells me that his estates in Antigua included the land upon which now sit V's old junior school Santa Familia and the ruins of the old Jesuit HQ (La Compañia de Jesus).

A friend and neighbour of ours is a bearer of the illustrious Castillo surname, now most closely associated with the brewing of nuestra cerveza...hence the little castillos on the neck of every bottle of Gallo.

First Words (24)

Whilom, as olde stories tellen us,
Ther was a duc that highte Theseus;
Of Atthenes he was lord and governour,
And in his tyme swich a conquerour,
That gretter was ther noon under the sonne.
Ful many a riche contree hadde he wonne,
What with his wysdom and his chivalrie;
He conquered al the regne of Femenye,
That whilom was ycleped Scithia,
And weddede the queene Ypolita,
And broghte hir hoom with hym in his contree,
With muchel glorie and greet solempnytee,
And eek hir yonge suster Emelye.
And thus with victorie and with melodye

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Knight's Tale (Late fourteenth century)

First Words (23)

"How Uther Pendragon sent for the duke of Cornwall and Igraine his wife, and of their departing suddenly again.

It befell in the days of Uther Pendragon, when he was king of all England, and so reigned, that there was a mighty duke in Cornwall that held war against him long time. And the duke was called the Duke of Tintagil. And so by means King Uther sent for this duke, charging him to bring his wife with him, for she was called a fair lady, and a passing wise, and her name was called Igraine."

Sir Thomas Mallory, Le Morte D'Arthur Book 1 (Published 1485 by William Caxton)

First Words (22)

"London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes--gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest."

Charles Dickens, Bleak House (1852/3)

First Words (21)

"I am a sick man...I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man. I believe my liver is diseased. However, I know nothing at all about my disease, and do not know for certain what ails me. I don't consult a doctor for it, and never have, though I have a respect for medicine and doctors. Besides, I am extremely superstitious, sufficiently so to respect medicine, anyway (I am well-educated enough not to be superstitious, but I am superstitious). No, I refuse to consult a doctor from spite. That you probably will not understand. Well, I understand it, though. Of course, I can't explain who it is precisely that I am mortifying in this case by my spite: I am perfectly well aware that I cannot "pay out" the doctors by not consulting them; I know better than anyone that by all this I am only injuring myself and no one else. But still, if I don't consult a doctor it is from spite. My liver is bad, well — let it get worse!"

Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From The Underground (1864)

First Words (20)

"Hoy, en esta isla, ha ocurrido un milagro: el verano se adelantó. Puse la cama cerca de la pileta de natación y estuve bañándome, hasta muy tarde. Era imposible dormir. Dos o tres minutos afuera bastaban para convertir en sudor el agua que debía protegerme de la espantosa calma. A la madrugada me despertó un fonógrafo. No pude volver al museo, a buscar las cosas. Huí por las barrancas. Estoy en los bajos del sur, entre plantas acuáticas, indignado por los mosquitos, con el mar o sucios arroyos hasta la cintura, viendo que anticipé absurdamente mi huida. Creo que esa gente no vino a buscarme; tal vez no me hayan visto. Pero sigo mi destino; estoy desprovisto de todo, confinado al lugar más escaso, menos habitable de la isla; a pantanos que el mar suprime una vez por semana."

Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel (1940)

"Today, on this island, a miracle happened: summer came ahead of time. I moved my bed out by the swimming pool, but then, because it was impossible to sleep, I stayed in the water for a long time. The heat was so intense that after I had been out of the pool for only two or three minutes I was already bathed in perspiration again. As day was breaking, I awoke to the sound of a phonograph record. Afraid to go back to the museum to get my things, I ran away down through the ravine. Now I am in the lowlands at the southern part of the island, where the aquatic plants grow, where mosquitoes torment me, where I find myself waist-deep in dirty streams of sea water. And, what is worse, I realize that there was no need to run away at all. Those people did not come here on my account; I believe they did not even see me. But here I am, without provisions, trapped in the smallest, least habitable part of the island — the marshes that the sea floods once each week."

First Words (19)

"The wind, coming to the city from far away, brings it unusual gifts, noticed by only a few sensitive souls, such as hay-fever victims, who sneeze at the pollen from flowers of other lands."

Italo Calvino, Marcovaldo (Spring: 1: Mushrooms in the City)

First Words (18)

"In December 1959, shortly after the Castro victory in Cuba, I attended several of the trials of war criminals conducted in the Cabaña fortress of Havana, in the course of which I was subjected to an extraordinary encounter with Herman Marks, the American who had become the Cuban executioner. Marks spent some time justifying his activities and expounding his personal philosophy, in the hope that I might help to rectify his image 'in the world's eyes'. I suspected that his Cuban employers only saw him as a painful necessity. A year or so later a friend visited Cuba with the intention of writing a book, and included Marks in a list of persons he might find interesting to see. When he returned I asked how the meeting had gone. His reply was 'I was too late. They'd already put him up against the wall'"

Norman Lewis, Fidel's Artist

First Words (17)

"Except for the Marabar Caves — and they are twenty miles off — the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary. Edged rather than washed by the river Ganges, it trails for a couple of miles along the bank, scarcely distinguishable from the rubbish it deposits so freely. There are no bathing steps on the river front, and bazaars shut out the wide and shifting panorama of the stream. The streets are mean, the temples ineffective, and though a few fine houses exist they are hidden away in gardens or down alleys whose filth deters all but the invited guest. Chandrapore was never large or beautiful, but two hundred years ago it lay on the road between Upper India, then imperial, and the sea, and the fine houses date from that period. The zest for decoration stopped in the eighteenth century, nor was it ever democratic. In the bazaars there is no painting and scarcely any carving. The very wood seems made of mud, the inhabitants of mud moving. So abased, so monotonous is everything that meets the eye, that when the Ganges comes down it might be expected to wash the excresence back into the soil. Houses do fall, people are drowned and left rotting, but the general outline of the town persists, swelling here, shrinking there, like some low but indestructible form of life."

E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (1924)

First Words (16)

"He was not to do anything in bad taste, the woman of the inn warned old Eguchi. He was not to try to put his finger into the mouth of the sleeping girl, or try anything of that sort."

Yasunabi Kawabata, House of the Sleeping Beauties (1961)

First Words (15)

"Sheepwater, 20 March 18— The doctor has just left me. I've finally got some sense out of him! Try as he might, he finally had to come clean. Yes, I'll soon die, very soon. The rivers'll thaw out and I'll probably float away with the last snow....Where to? God only knows! And into the sea — well, if one must die, one might as well die in the spring. But doesn't it seem comic to be beginning one's diary with perhaps only two more weeks to live? What of it? What makes fourteen days any less a time than fourteen years or fourteen centuries? In the face of eternity, they say, all things are as nothing; but in that case eternity itself is a mere nothing. It seems I'm falling prey to philosophical musings, which is a bad sign — am I perhaps getting cold feet? I'd better start telling my story. Outside it's bitterly damp and windy and I've been forbidden to go out. So what's there to tell? A decent man doesn't speak of his ill health; and it's not my business to go rattling off yarns; and I haven't the capacity for deliberating on elevated matters; and descriptions of the surrounding scene would bore even me, just as I am bored by doing nothing and I'm too apathetic to read. Hey-ho, then, I'll tell myself the story of my own life. What a splendid idea! With death approaching that's a respectable thing to do and unlikely to cause offence to anyone. I am starting now."

Ivan Turgenev, The Diary of a Superfluous Man

First Words (14)

"This book is principally the story of a man who lived out the greater part of his life in Western Europe, in the latter half of the century. Though alone for much of his life, he was nonetheless closely in touch with other men. He lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, the men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. Feelings such as love, tenderness and human fellowship had, for the most part, disappeared; the relationships between his contemporaries were at best indifferent and more often cruel."

Michel Houellebecq, Atomised (Les Particules Élémentaires.)

See also: my review of the book....and the film.

First Words (13)

I was woken this morning by the bell of the church in Panorama tolling dolefully. So today's first words are the famous lines by Donne, which were later turned into a poem...and supplied both Hemingway and Thomas Merton with the titles of twentieth century works:

"No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee..."

John Donne, Meditation 17 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624)

First Words (12)

"Reginald sat in a corner of the Princess's salon and tried to forgive the furniture, which started out with an obvious intention of being Louis Quinze, but relapsed at frequent intervals into Wilhelm II.

"He classified the Princess with that distinct type of woman that looks as if it habitually went out to feed hens in the rain.

"Her name was Olga; she kept what she hoped and believed to be a fox-terrier and professed what she thought were Socialist opinions. It is not necessary to be called Olga if you are a Russian Princess; in fact, Reginald knew quite a number who were called Vera; but the fox-terrier and Socialism are essential."

Saki, Reginald in Russia (1910)

First Words (11)

"He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built, and he advanced straight at you with a slight stoop of the shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from-under stare which made you think of a charging bull. His voice was deep, loud, and his manner displayed a kind of dogged self-assertion which had nothing aggressive in it. It seemed a necessity and it was directed apparently as much at himself as at anybody else. He was spotlessly neat, apparelled in immaculate white from shoes to hat, and in the various Eastern ports where he got his living as ship-chandler's water-clerk he was very popular."

Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim (1899)

Conrad's buddy Ford Maddox Ford wrote that the author of the above paragraph was "never really satisfied that he had got his characters in, he was never convinced that he had convinced the reader; this accounting for the great lengths of some of his books."

Both men apparently fancied a sentence from, La Reine Hortense, a Maupassant short story:

"He was a gentleman with red whiskers who always went first through a doorway."

I detect an echo of it in this first paragraph of Lord Jim — one of his shorter novels — which unusually goes about getting the lead character in from the get-go, artfully combining a concise physical description with a certain dynamism plus a therapist's eye for human disposition. For the worst thing a writer can do really is describe each new character entering a story as if trying to verbalise a photographic image. As Harvard Professor James Woods puts it:

"The unpractised novelist cleaves to the static, because it is much easier to describe than the mobile."

I have a particular soft spot for Lord Jim as I first read it here in Antigua when I came across a reasonably well-preserved 1964 New American Library paperback edition on the book-swap shelves of a now-defunct Spanish school back in 1989. I stll treasure it.

First Words (10)

"The silence of snow, thought the man sitting just behind the bus driver. If this were the beginning of a poem, he would have called the thing he felt inside him the silence of snow."

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

First Words (9)

"You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, "No, I don't want to watch TV!" Raise your voice — they won't hear you otherwise — "I'm reading! I don't want to be disturbed!" Maybe they haven't heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell; "I'm beginning to read Italo Calvino's new novel!" Or if you prefer, don't say anything; just hope they'll leave you alone."

Italo Calvino, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler.

Thanks to Pedro for the suggestion.

Meanwhile, Sting salutes Calvino's seminal postmodern novel with the name of his new albumload of rearranged British folk tunes:




And in the original....

"Stai per cominciare a leggere il nuovo romanzo Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore di Italo Calvino. Rilassati. Raccogliti, Allontana da te ogni altro pensiero. Lascia che il mondo che ti circonda sfumi nell'indistinto. La porta è meglio chiuderla; di là c'è sempre la televisione accesa. Dillo subito, agli altri: «No, non voglio vedere la televisione!» Alza la voce, se no non ti sentono: «Sto leggendo! Non voglio essere disturbato!» Forse non ti hanno sentito, con tutto quel chiasso; dillo più forte, grida: «Sto cominciando a leggere il nuovo romanzo di Italo Calvino! » O se non vuoi non dirlo; speriamo che ti lascino in pace. "

First Words (8)

"Apparently I am what is known as an Unreliable Narrator, though of course if you believe everything you're told you deserve whatever you get."

Iain Banks, Transition

First Words (6)

"Comedy is a game played to throw reflections upon social life, and it deals with human nature in the drawing-room of civilized men and women, where we have no dust of the struggling outer world, no mire, no violent crashes, to make the correctness of the representation convincing. Credulity is not wooed through the impressionable senses; nor have we recourse to the small circular glow of the watchmaker's eye to raise in bright relief minutest grains of evidence for the routing of incredulity. The Comic Spirit conceives a definite situation for a number of characters, and rejects all accessories in the exclusive pursuit of them and their speech. For being a spirit, he hunts the spirit in men; vision and ardour constitute his merit; he has not a thought of persuading you to believe in him. Follow and you will see. But there is a question of the value of a run at his heels."

George Meredith, The Egoist